Yesterday, Amazon launched its Art Marketplace, and I’m really excited. I expect it will vastly expand the art marketplace by inviting the casual shopper. But for brokers, they will need to completely change their business model to respond to this new opportunity.

Is there a casual shopper for art? Absolutely — this is why most malls in metropolitan centers have galleries. I myself was captivated by a Warhol in such a gallery when I was 19 or 20 and ended up buying it, before I even had a car. I started off idly admiring it, came back a couple times over the following days or weeks, and went ahead and got it. If it had not been so accessible, I not only would not have bought it, I would probably not even have paid attention to the art scene at all in my subsequent years.

Up until now, there has been a daunting set of obstacles to online art shopping that is discouraging to all but the most determined customer. There hasn’t been an obvious, stable art exchange online, and it’s hard to figure out what to Google when you’re shopping for fine art (“broker” isn’t the first word that comes to mind for most people). Typically the existing services involve making private inquiries with the dealer just to find out “how many zeroes we’re talking.” These sites are usually badly designed, and there’s often no obvious way to buy the damn thing.

Amazon Gives Art a Shopping Cart

Enter Amazon.

I expect that by making shopping for art as easy as shopping for anything else, and by throwing the might of the Amazon brand behind the effort, Amazon will significantly expand the size of the art market. It removes the aforementioned barriers to entry. Yes, there will be a lot of time-wasting unqualified leads, but at least they will be doing it on the web site instead of the dealer’s phone.

But what of the dealers?

It’s interesting that Amazon Art is strictly a marketplace for established dealers – about 50 at launch. I think this is the right approach, but I expect that won’t last long, if the main Amazon Marketplace is any example. Dealers will get the mighty twin advantages of Amazon’s exposure and e-commerce infrastructure, and the increased sales will make them more comfortable selling to the hoi polloi. Soon, though, individuals like me will be looking to sell into the same marketplace. Will Amazon make it easy for me to compete with dealers? If so, why would anyone use a dealer, when their perceived value was in providing access to potential buyers?

The challenge for dealers will be to clarify what services they can still provide to justify giving them their traditional cut – or any cut at all. Certainly I think even (especially!) Amazon buyers will be more confident buying from established dealers than from individuals; this will translate directly to an increase in a reasonable selling price. Dealers’ experience with actually handling the art (packing and shipping, and even documentation) will also be helpful to the seller and reassuring to the buyer. (Of course, getting the artwork to the dealer may present additional challenges if they’re not local.) The dealer may be able to provide valuable assistance by coordinating appraisals, photography and restoration services.

How will these dealers communicate these value-adds to potential sellers? Hopefully, Amazon will provide a way for would-be individual sellers to make that decision and find the right dealer. In any case, dealers need to immediately rethink their business model.

If I were an art broker

In the face of this new development, the art dealer has a choice. Try to compete for customers against Amazon and go the way of the independent bookseller, or pivot the entire business model to attract sellers instead of buyers.

If I were a broker or a dealer, I would drop everything and start thinking about how to get individual sellers to go through me instead of going through Amazon directly. I would make sure I have a stable of available appraisers, framers, researchers, and conservators. I would make sure I have a great packing/shipping solution in place and make sure all of this is demonstrable to potential customers. Sales figures, customer success stories, testimonials, social media – all of it needs to be ready to go when needed.

My sales staff needs to immediately shift focus. Instead of selling to traditional customers, they need to rope in individual sellers. Certainly, the traditional model isn’t going to evaporate for up to a generation. But the savvy dealer will maximize the opportunity of an expanded marketplace and leave the traditional models to someone else who really wants to struggle.

Elisa’s son needed a somewhat less remote location to shot pickups for his capstone movie. Even though my mom had a date in the house that night, she was gracious enough to let Keli’i and the actors and crew take over her backyard for the evening. Her property had all the right ingredients; space, plenty of electrical outlets outside, some trees to match the existing footage passably, plus a bathroom. Even a place to do the ADR.

After trying for my entire adulthood, I finally have a workshop. There’s more to it than this, but the fact that my tools and supplies are visible, organized and accessible at the same time is unprecedented.

The white cabinet is actually an Ikea kitchen cabinet — I bought it to use up a bunch of Ikea drawers left over from the remodel (don’t ask — seriously, don’t) and then I made a countertop for it. The drawers are nice and deep and hold my tools that don’t have cases.

I wish I had a whole bunch more of those steel Wall Control pegboards — my girlfriend got them for me for Christmas and they are absolutely badass.

Offscreen to the left is another tech bench with organizer drawers and a top shelf with a neat row of tools in cases. I still have a bit of work to do, some more bins to consolidate and some duplicate tools to get rid of. It was deeply embarrassing how many things I had multiples of; a whole bin of picture-hanging hardware and hollow-wall anchors, five stapleguns (!) eight measuring tapes (damn things just disappear all the time) four dustpans, five hammers, two jigsaws, three circular saws, enough plant hooks to turn the library into a forest, several pounds of drywall screws, enough pegboard accessories for about another whole garage (I’ve been gearing up for this for over a decade). It was just ridiculous.

But it’s here and now I can finish so many of the projects that remain around the house. First project will be the knobs in the kitchen at last, then I will make two windowsills so that I can call one room in the house completely done (the master bathroom), Next will be the kitchen, then its time to focus on the library I think.

I tried to make my own Capital One Image Card, where you can upload your own picture. I used my own art (shown here), which made for a cool looking card. It was rejected by Capital One, with the reasoning that it could be deemed “offensive” to others.

Sorry, we were unable to approve the image you submitted

Sorry the image you submitted for your Capital One® Image Card has been rejected. We will not approve any images that contain the following:

I called up and went through the list of all the things you’re not allowed to do (gang imagery, celebrities, copyright infringement etc.) and showed that my image passed the criteria. The lady kept blaming the “back office” and evading me, but eventually I cornered the lady into saying that they weren’t going to print it because it was ugly. “We prefer the verbiage ‘offensive’ to ‘ugly’.”

She also revealed that they’re only looking for snapshots — which is nowhere on their site. Interestingly, they say “pets, or a favorite photo,” and their ads show an evil overlord adding kittens to his. But it seems marmots are off the list.

Update:

I tried again, uploading the one without the mask to see if it was less ugly. Here’s what I got back:

Sorry the image you submitted for your Capital One® Image CardSM has been rejected. We will not approve any images that contain the following:

Celebrities such as actors, musicians, athletes, or cartoons.

If you believe that you have been declined in error, please call us at 1-866-381-0451.

I talked to a nice, not disdainful lady named Dee who asked me who the man was. I told her it was a random ambrotype from the 1800′s. I could have said it was an ancestor and probably gotten it through but I wanted to see if the truth would work. She said that based on what I said she would try to put it through again, no guarantees.

I realized I had not posted an update about my employment situation in some time. I have a job now. It’s a contract position for a company called Premier Retail Networks, in San Francisco. It’s a division of Technicolor (Thomson) with I guess about 250 people. The company provides services for retailers who wish to advertise products on video screens in their stores. Content compression, editing, distribution, the screens themselves, the whole bit. If you see one of these screens (and it doesn’t have a DVD player attached, we don’t use those) it’s probably us. But it’s an odd signpost in my career.

My early professional career started with the VideoVision card, enabling your computer to capture video and enabling you to send your computer monitor out to a TV screen. It was one of the early entries at both, and and it was the best. Then I worked on the VideoVision Studio upgrade, a JPEG add-on that allowed it to do full-motion full-quality video on a desktop Mac (with a stonking huge, fast disk array). This was really cool. The first one to do this on the desktop threw away a field (an important part of the video that makes the motion smooth — and represents half the image data) and compressed the daylights out of what was left; ours could ease up on the compression if your disk was faster so someone with a good system could compete with the big editing and post houses. This enabled a cottage industry of independent professionals to spring up, and I was proud of the role I played in that.

Then DV came along and I got involved in software codecs, and enabled ordinary humans to edit videos without elaborate systems. This was also fantastic. Oh, and while I was there I did some really good work at learning how to represent a company online, and designed Radius’ first public-facing site and loaded it with real information that really helped people get the most out of these systems.

From there I went to Adobe, to the Premiere team, where I continued to make sure that products changed the technological landscape for content creation. I added a lot of innovation around metadata interoperability that will enable people to get the most out of the media they create. I went to the Scene7 group, a service at Adobe which enabled small companies to have sophisticated imagery and video on their Web sites without the massive infrastructure costs and complexities of actually hosting it themselves.

And now, I’m at PRN. What am I enabling here? In-store advertising. I’m not enabling anything, really. I’m not delivering power to people. I’m not changing the world.

It’s taking some getting used to.

There might be opportunities for real innovation; I see some already. But I need to accept that I AM IN ADVERTISING.

When did it become OK for HR departments to simply not respond to resumé submissions at all? Not even a “We’ve received your resume and we’ll let you know if we find anything suitable”? This seems arrogant and unprofessional. Did this happen with the meltdown or has it been going on for a long time? I know that as a hiring manager I thought it was simply a matter of professionalism to provide at least a minimum of civility, even if I wasn’t hiring at the time.

I’m finding that sites that are even soliciting resumés for a given position aren’t responding at all. You submit it and a badly designed web forms processor reports in geekspeak that the upload succeeded, and after that… [sound of crickets chirping in the distance…]

In the litigious US, it’s also become bad practice to actually tell the prospective employee why they didn’t get the job. It opens one up to lawsuits. And because sume buttheads sued companies over what was said about why they didn’t get a job, none of us get to find out any more. ”Wrong fit.” I’ve asked for tips on my interviewing technique or critiques, but I get the same response as if I had submitted a resumé.

It creates a culture of desperation, an unfortunate establishment of an extreme power imbalance that has a historic habit of eroding labor relations and even employee’s rights. I’ve already seen hints of that “Just be glad you have a job” attitude from employers that is so dangerous.It’s easy to forget in these difficult times that companies really do need us employees to exist — the proof is that there are open reqs here and there. Do you think that a publicly-held company would be actually hiring anyone if they weren’t desperate to fill it? Shareholders don’t like that; they want to see headcount or at least operating expenses go down. So have a little pride, and don’t just take whatever bullshit they try to hand you. Sure, they’ll just hire someone else with a little less self-respect, but they’ll also know that they had to let a better candidate walk away, which at least puts a damper on their hubris, and maybe keep it from running amok.

The accursed office shelves are finally up. Not having these has created chaos for three years. I still have to finish one plank in the top left corner that needs special treament due to the roof slant, but the hard part is finished.

They’re seriously overbuilt because I plan to load them with the various paper stocks we’ve accumulated, which currently occupy several very heavy boxes. And you can’t just build a couple shelves heavy duty, you kind of have to build them all that way.

I tried to build them cheaply myself; it didn’t work. I built them myself but it was not cheap. I ended up with like 26 brackets at $7 a piece (the cheaper ones looked wimpy), and like $130 in melamine shelf planks. Plus I replaced the weedy little bracket screws with big ol’ ⅜” x 2½” lag screws and washers to go right into the studs (I am now emotionally attached to the Makita cordless impact driver I bought recently) and I bought tie plates for the joins up on the tops to keep them even and distribute the weight a bit. All this bought me a whopping 30 square feet of strong shelf space. I think these shelves could hold me.

(The fun part is knowing that all this is probably making somebody out there feel stirrings in naughty places.)

I had a cool little system. The impact drill for the heavy work of screwing in the big lags and drilling pilot holes all over the place and the little Bosch cordless screwdriver for everything else. I used a laser level on a tripod to get everything even, which worked GREAT, and a little mini level to cross-check and straighten the bracket. I could rapidly go from bracket to bracket alternating between the three hand tools. Sweet.

And finally, after three years, I was able to install the in-wall speaker you see there. I’ve been waiting for the shelves to go in so I knew where I could install that; the ugly wire has been hanging out of a tiny lump in the wall like a persisent umbilicus for this whole time, mocking me. Now I can go around putting the rest of them in (which will clear space in my wiring closet) and reach a new kind of nerdvana. I’ll have music in my room, the kitchen, this office and even my bathroom.

I confess I had somehow forgotten how astonishingly pervasive drywall dust is, especially when you use a Rotozip, and the room got kind of trashed. Oops.